by Steven Hall
3. Computers. Five blocky, 1980s computers positioned at the five corner points of the assemblage. Every computer had been connected to its two immediate neighbours with white phone cables and together these created a boat-shaped conceptual loop following the edges of the plank outline. Each computer also had a black power cable which led to the tea chest containing the car battery. All the computers were switched off.
4. Barrels. Three large, sealed, clear plastic barrels stood near the front of the assemblage. The barrels had been filled with Yellow Pages phone books and other telephone directories along with sticky wads of Post-it notes, address books and several Filofaxes. Each barrel also contained two or three black plastic devices which looked like small fax machines or modified telephones with little telescopic aerials. Fidorous said these were speed diallers. He went on to excitedly explain how the best of these machines was capable of dialling up to thirty phone numbers in a minute.
5. Cardboard flooring. A large sheet of cardboard laid out over some of the boxes creating a waist-high ‘flying deck’. From the thickness of the cardboard and the arrangement of the boxes it looked unlikely that this deck would be able to support anyone’s weight without collapsing.
6. Steering wheel. The steering wheel from a Volkswagen laid flat on the cardboard flooring.
7. Stepladders. A set of old wooden stepladders unopened and leant against the boxes as a completely impractical stairway up from the floor to the flying deck.
8. Strimmer. A green plastic garden strimmer laid against a box so the strimmer’s head and strimming wire faced out and away from the rest of the assemblage. Fidorous called the strimmer ‘Prop 1’.
9. Office chair. To the right of the strimmer arrangement, a slightly battered office swivel chair with blue padding. Like most office chairs, this one had wheels but these had been disabled with five or six bike chains, several padlocks and a steering wheel lock. A long garden cane lay across the seat.
10. Ian the cat. Asleep.
11. Coat hangers. Several dozen metal coat hangers arranged around the edges of the leading plank. The coat hangers had been connected together hook-to-corner or hook-to-hook to create a haphazard sort of chain.
12. Nobody’s laptop. Nobody’s laptop mounted on a plastic packing box. The laptop was on, the screen glowing blue and scrolling with heavy white source code. An internet cable ran from the back and away up into the rafters. A black power cable connected the laptop to the car battery in the tea chest.
13. Box of paper. A cardboard box positioned on the edge of the plank outline and filled with reams of blank A4 paper. A letterbox slit had been cut into the away-facing side of the box.
14. Desk fan. A big cream desk fan with a cage around the blades standing upright a few inches outside the plank outline. Fidorous referred to the desk fan as ‘Prop 2’.
“I’m not going to say it,” I said as we came full circle around the Orpheus, but then I said it anyway. “This isn’t a boat, it’s just stuff. I get the computer loop, but the rest of it–if the shark comes are we, what, going to climb up on those boxes and play Ahab or something?”
“Or something.” Behind his Michael Caine glasses Fidorous’s face hummed with what physicists call potential energy.
“But it’s just–”
“Yes, I heard you the first time. You’re quite correct. It’s just stuff, just beautiful ordinary things. But the idea these things embody, the meaning we’ve assigned to them in putting them together like this, that’s what’s important.”
I looked again at the assortment of wood and boxes and cardboard and wires. “This is another conviction thing, isn’t it?”
Fidorous looked to be searching his brain for something. After a second he found it. “Have you heard of Matisse?”
I nodded.
“Good. Well, one day a man, a potential buyer, visited Matisse in his studio. This man spent a while looking at one of the artist’s latest works before suddenly declaring ‘That woman’s arm is too long.’ Do you know what Matisse said to him?”
I shook my head.
“He said, ‘That is not a woman, sir. It’s a painting.’”
Fidorous walked away to inspect the assemblage. I watched as he adjusted the desk fan’s alignment slightly and tapped at its wire cage with a biro, listening carefully to the sound.
“So that’s what you’re doing?” I said. “You’re building the woman?”
“Exactly, and succinctly put too. We’re building the woman, not the painting.” The doctor stood and brushed down his trousers. “All this stuff, it might help to think of it as a kind of focus tool, a way of ensuring the woman, when we’ve finished her, is one single woman and not like–like a 3D film with the glasses off. Do they still make those?”
“What?”
“3D films.”
“Erm, yeah, I think so.”
“Good, good. I liked them. Very useful. Anyway, you can store your things in here.” Fidorous motioned for my backpack and when I took it to him he placed it inside one of the Orpheus’s tea chests.
I watched him tinkering with the arrangement, shuffling my bag around in the box until it looked right to him. It was as if Fidorous had gears, as if someone kept switching his brain settings from angry hermit to vengeful scientist to thoughtful monk to excited kid on a climbing frame. How many more Trey Fidorous’s were still hidden away under all that hair? The thought worried me more than I wanted to admit. With the First Eric’s training I’d become pretty good at figuring people out, but the fact was I couldn’t get a grip on this man at all.
“Good, yes,” Fidorous said, smiling up at me. “Now what’s in that plastic bag?”
“My Dictaphones.”
“Excellent. I think we’ll have them–here.” The plastic bag went into a smaller cardboard box. “And…yes.” He patted down his pockets, removed the ancient paint brush he’d given me the night before and carefully placed it on the packing case next to Nobody’s laptop. “I think that’s good for now. Yes, it’s good. Right. You stay here, I’m going to see if I can find where Scout’s hiding herself, and we still have to find some sort of anchor.”
“Okay, if you don’t need me for any of this maybe I could do some work on the QWERTY code?”
“No.” Stepping out of the assemblage, he pointed to the glass of paper strips still in my hand. “That’s your priority. You have to drink that water if any of this going to work. Understood?”
“Sure. Okay.”
“Good.” Once free, he started towards the exit. “Good. You get on with that and we’ll deal with the boat.”
I tugged the collar of my coat up. Now I was alone, the air felt cold, thoughtful and old. The empty room smelled vaguely of pulled up carpets and abandoned factories. It was quiet too, my footsteps making sharp thunk-clicks over yards of flat concrete flooring.
Except I wasn’t really alone, was I?
“Well, I’m glad none of this is affecting your routine too much.”
From the top of his cardboard box, one of Ian’s ears swivelled around to listen to me while the rest of him pretended to be asleep.
“Why would you want to come down here anyway? It’s cold and–un-Ian like.”
The ear twitched a couple of times then drifted forwards again, casually letting me know this conversation wasn’t going to happen.
“Fine,” I said.
I put my hand over the top of the glass full of papers and shook it a couple of times, the way you shake a snow globe. The little oblong strips inside gave a muffled rustle on the bounce of each shake, but nothing else changed. I walked over to the wall and sat down against it, feeling the hard floor through my jeans. Out in the middle of all that grey space, the Orpheus sat quietly like the car boot sale collage it was. I could just make out Ian’s furry ribs rising and falling gently, seemingly without a care in the world.
I blew out a sigh that no one was around to hear. In my still-tired brain, the events and developments of the past twenty-four hours, the
twists and the turns, the hurts and the shocks, they all added up to a great and complex labyrinth that I didn’t have the strength to puzzle out anymore. Instead, I resigned myself only to plodding forward. Sleepy and detached enough to be able to look down at events casually as if from the outside, I thought about coming out of the other side, about leaving the underground spaces, the papers and knotted sideways ideas behind. Drifting near the edge of sleep, I found myself thinking about Scout and the way we’d been for that short time together, the way her body smelled and felt against my skin, her sharp-edged laugh, her ruffled bob and the way our fingers had brushed, caught onto each other and then pulled our hands together as we’d made our way through flickery corridors. The memories stung and I pushed them back. If I did climb back up into the world after this, it would be alone, just me and Ian again. The thought washed through my body with a cold little swell. Maybe I could talk to her? Maybe I could say of course I understand why you did it and apologise for being so scared and stupid, and maybe everything could go back to how it was when we’d been–whatever it was that we’d been. But I was scared, scared of her laughing or even worse, her being kind and explaining how sorry she was, but that she’d only ever needed me for this. My sleepy mind acted out the scene while drifting towards strange territories. What if I told her about the other thing, the hidden thing, the nonsense thing? The thing that insisted that she was connected to Clio Aames. Connected? Go on, say it. The thing that insisted–go on say it–she was Clio Aames. There couldn’t be anything more stupid to think or say and yet–and yet an unfamiliar part of me from deep deep inside said it might be the only way to bring this fractured world back into alignment.
I nodded, jumped awake, my hand twitching around the glass. Sleep had made a grab for me and I’d caught my fingernails on the edge of the conscious world at the last minute. I lifted the glass and took a good look at the strips of paper inside. No change.
“Right,” I said to myself and to the glass, trying to kick-start my brain. I geared up for another shot at the concept of water.
The morning wore on. Scout and Fidorous returned to the Orpheus assemblage over and over again bringing more stuff. Occasionally the doctor would call over to me to ask how I was doing or tell me the function of objects they were including in the floor plan. A bundle of books tied with a thin chain became the anchor, a clothes prop extending from the side was the winching arm and a torch shining its beam straight up at the ceiling was the mast. They added other things too: more planks, car headlamps and real gas tanks and scuba gear. Fidorous brought Ian’s carrier and included that in the assemblage along with everything else. Scout took off her heavy waterproof coat and worked in her vest top, tucking her hair behind her ears only to have it escape and get in her way every time she bent down. I watched her re-tuck and re-tuck it from behind my glass of papers, trying not to be seen. It felt like a volatile border had grown up between us and I could only risk quick glances across. The one time she caught me looking at her I froze. Scout had looked down quickly and then away, maybe having the same thoughts as me, maybe not.
I had no success with the glass. I stared into the little nest of tangled strips for hours trying to see something other than paper and print, but I couldn’t see anything else because that’s all there was.
Lunchtime came and I realised I hadn’t eaten all day. My body was too tired to make a big song and dance about it but the problem registered as a slow ache with a green of sickness around the edges. I ignored it.
Scout and Fidorous wheeled in a pallet truck carrying two large black oblong blocks. It took me a moment to realise what they were: amplifiers. They arranged them at the far end of the cellar and began to hook them up to fixtures in the wall.
“Floodgates,” Fidorous called over when he saw me watching. “Do you want to hear?”
I said that I did.
Scout stood back, glancing over at me once and then turning her attention back to the equipment. Somebody must have flipped a switch. The sound of speaking voices filled the room, low fluid and high tinkling voices, and voices in between, all talking into and around and through each other and merging into a flow of sound. All the voices were saying the same word over and over again–water water water water water water water water water water water water water.
Half an hour later and I was lying on my back, hands behind my head, glass at my side. I’d taken a single strand of paper and was chewing on it, trying to convince the idea of cool fresh liquid out of the warm pulpy mass between my teeth. I was thinking how it was a hopeless, impossible task, how I did not know how to extract the concept of water from words and, in front of Scout or not, I would have to say so to Fidorous.
With these thoughts rolling in on me, breaking, crashing and warping into strange shapes, I began to sink away from wakefulness and down into the deep quiet of sleep.
I blinked and sat up on my plastic sun lounger under the parasol. Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I enjoyed the way the warm dry air rolled into my mouth and nose, evaporating the moisture away. I put my book down, scanned the surf and then the deeper sea for Clio but couldn’t see her. I turned to where her sun lounger would usually be but I was alone. Six or seven feet of empty sand away, a couple of blonde teenage girls giggled to each other in French. On the other side, an old man with a big belly, dark glasses and white curly plumage on his chest read one of those spy novels where the author’s name is large and gold and takes up half the cover. But no Clio.
A finger of panic touched the back of my neck. I decided to go back to the campsite.
Our tent was gone. The hammock was gone. Her bags, my bags, everything. I looked around the other plots to see if she’d moved us while I’d been at the beach, but no. There was only the flattened sandy dirt and the holes left by our tent pegs.
“Hello.”
A small boy in a huge Mr Tickle sun hat looked up at me, holding out a folded piece of paper. Behind him, a girl with inflatable pink armbands waited patiently. I thanked him and took the paper. Both children looked at me for a moment then ran away, the girl trailing behind and calling out something in German. I unfolded the note:
Eric,
What’s the point of me coming all the way back there for you if you’re just going to show up here without me? You div.
Clio xx
Something changed. The physical me vanished.
The new disembodied me floated up into the dry dusty air, looking down at the trees, bamboo and coloured tents of the campsite for a moment before streaking off towards the beach. I rocketed over the campsite bar and over the taverna with the coloured lanterns, over the rows of white parasols and out across the bright blue water that quickly turned dark blue and serious as the ocean got deeper underneath me. I felt the heat of the sun, a cool breeze lifting up off the waves and then I lunged downwards, hitting the water with a wet slam and powering down through horizonless blue towards the deep deep black…
I lurched upright with a gasp. I remembered it. I remembered the dream. Every detail pin-sharp, high resolution Technicolor clear. Before now my Light Bulb dreams had always evaporated into vague feelings as I came round to wakefulness, but now, for whatever reason, this one had fixed itself in my mind.
Before I could focus on it, why it might have happened, what it might mean, another sensation muscled its way in past the surprise and grabbed hold of my attention. The side of my leg was wet. I looked around, still a little dazed, still a little dream-shocked. I saw a glass tipped over and the spilled water soaking a patch of my jeans dark before making a long thin lake of itself on the concrete floor.
The side of my leg was wet.
Like an explosion played backwards, the last few hours rushed together into a single focused point. I took hold of the glass and stood up. The paper and the words were gone. Now there was water, just a half centimetre left in the bottom, but real physical water where the words had been. It had happened. Somehow, I’d done it.
Scout and Fidorous were straightening p
lanks on the Orpheus floor plan.
“Doctor.”
They both turned and I held up the glass, tipping the tiniest drop of the remaining water out so they could see what had happened.
Fidorous gave me a wave to come over but then–something pulled his attention away. He stood still, head tipped to one side, listening. Scout must have started to say something because the doctor brought a finger up to his lips in a silent shhh. Then I heard it too, a murmuring, a noise almost below the bottom end of human hearing but getting louder, rising up.
The doctor’s face relaxed into a slack panic.
“Stop it,” he shouted over to me, waving frantically. “You’re going too far. You’re going too far, you have to stop it.”
“I’m not–” I held up the glass as if it might prove something “–I’m not doing anything.”
The doctor turned to Scout, and I saw his mouth making the words: “Computers. Quickly.”
She looked at him, at me, and then sprinted to the nearest of the five white PCs and started powering it up.
“Eric Sanderson Two,” Fidorous called over, trying to keep his voice level. “You have to come over here. Come here right now.”
The murmur grew into a noise, a growing rumble of voices winding, melting and flowing together from the twin amplifiers–water water water water water water–louder and louder and louder.
“Jesus,” Scout risked a glance at the speakers and then over at me. “Jesus, Eric, come on.”
My palm pressed over the top of the glass as I ran towards the Orpheus.
I didn’t make it.
The fronts of the amplifiers blew off and ton after ton of high pressure water thundered out into the cellar.
FOUR
